The UK’s Nuffield Council on Bioethics says it’s acceptable to genetically engineer human embryos, so long as the interventions aren’t harmful to the future child or society as a whole. The council is taking a surprisingly progressive position on the matter, but we’re still a long way off from the birth of the…

A neuroscientist from Yale University is claiming to have developed a technique that preserves the brain tissue of pigs for an extended period following decapitation. The brains are apparently not conscious, but the new technique is raising a number of important ethical issues.

At a San Francisco biotech conference on Monday, DNA sequencing giant Illumina announced the launch of a new DNA sequencer that could push the cost of decrypting the human genome from $1,000 to just $100.

The next time you go in for surgery, you might come out thanking a crab. New research from the Harvard Wyss Institute shows that chitosan, which is a fancy term for crustacean goo, can be used as a biodegradable glue to heal wounds and patch surgical incisions.

A popular fertility treatment introduced in the early 1990s has been linked to low sperm counts in men born from the procedure. Scientists aren’t entirely sure why this is happening, but it’s entirely possible that fathers are passing their fertility issues down to the next generation.

Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has partnered with Apple on a new clinical study on rheumatoid arthritis. The study relies on an iPhone app to collect data about arthritic symptoms from users as they go about their daily lives. That sounds great at first glance, but how well will it protect your privacy?

Scientists have created three new genetically modified crops to combat three of the world’s most troubling crop diseases. Each was tweaked in a slightly different way to be resistant to those specific diseases. The details appear in three new papers out today in Nature Biotechnology.

Here’s something for all you hardcore party animals: when you can’t get to the rave, you now have the option of the “Audiopill.” It’s a miniaturized sound system housed inside a plastic microcapsule that you can swallow to groove internally to those sweet beats. And yes, it’s as crazy dangerous as it sounds.

Biotech visionary and entrepreneur Craig Venter, famous for inventing a technique to sequence his own genome back in the 1990s, has embarked on a new venture. For $25,000, his startup Human Longevity will give you every possible futuristic medical test, potentially revealing your risk for Alzheimer’s.

The Alphabet family just gained a member, after Sergey Brin announced that the zany, experimental life sciences group from Google X would become its own company. This is the same group of nerds that’s been building smart contact lenses. And it sounds like more crazy new inventions are on the way.

In news that sounds straight out of a dystopian Margaret Atwood novel, surgeons managed to keep a genetically modified pig heart alive inside a baboon for 945 days before it failed last month. “Xenotransplantation” experiments like this may one day lead to doctors raising pigs for organ transplants.

The worst part about getting vaccinated is the shot. I don’t care how much of a badass you are, it’s still painful and annoying. But now a group of researchers in Japan have tested a new “dissolving needle” that is basically a painless patch that you stick to your arm. And it works.

CRISPR, a new genome editing tool, could transform the field of biology—and a recent study on genetically-engineered human embryos has converted this promise into media hype. But scientists have been tinkering with genomes for decades. Why is CRISPR suddenly such a big deal?